Introducing our new section - OurNHS

This week we have launched OurNHS, a brand new section of openDemocracy dedicated to England's National Health Service (NHS). The Coalition's Health & Social Care Act 2012 formally ends the NHS as a free and comprehensive health service. OurNHS will be campaigning for its restoration. This introduction sets out what we are doing, with who, and why.

One
of the strangest things about the passage of the Health and Social Care Act
2012 was the divide between social media platforms and traditional media.
Stories could rage across the blogosphere without gaining any traction, or
indeed even a mention, in the press. And the BBC was by no means the only
offender here; it was simply the most disappointing.

With
the exception of The Guardian, the resulting geography of NHS ‘resistance’ is
one of patchy, but at times excellent, coverage in the press – The Telegraph
and The Daily Mail in particular – with enormous amounts of activity from the
public, bloggers, academics, activists and NHS staff bubbling underneath. This
is not to underplay the limited but growing interconnectivity between social
media and ‘big media’, but merely to recognise that there remain important
differences which have been particularly acute in the NHS debate.

What
the NHS needs now if it is to be reinstated post-2015 is large scale,
co-operative, creative and well organised campaigning. The first stage is to engage
the public with the realities of what has happened. That the Coalition’s NHS
“reforms” lack a democratic mandate is not in serious doubt. It has been
confirmed, whether implicitly or explicitly, even by senior Conservatives.
David Cameron himself, in a typically dishonest display, announced his “surprise” at the contents of Andrew
Lansley’s White Paper when he realised the scale of public outrage and the
damage it was doing to Brand Cameron. Yet according to a Conservative special
adviser,

“James O’Shaughnessy [Cameron’s director
of policy] would have penned quite a lot of the words. And all those things
were cleared by a policy board chaired by Cameron. So the idea that Cameron
didn’t know what was in it… He and Oliver Letwin helped write the Green
Papers.”
(Timmins, 2012, p38)

The
lack of a clear mandate is important because the changes are fundamental, they
go to the heart of what the NHS is and rip it out. The Secretary of State for
Health no longer has a legal duty to provide
or secure comprehensive healthcare to all English citizens – that has been
the legal foundation of the NHS since 1948. The state need only now “promote” a
comprehensive service. Cherry-picking of patients, fewer and fewer services
being provided for free and large scale privatisation are the real fundamentals
of the Health & Social Care Act – not “empowering GP’s” as the Coalition
(and the BBC) claimed.

Consequently,
the road to US style health provision becomes clear: reduced NHS services and
cherry-picking of patients will force more and more people down the route of
medical insurance and ‘top up’ plans. For the first time in over 60 years,
medical insurance will start to become a normal part of life. This is not
strictly a party-political issue – New Labour were instrumental in
reconfiguring the NHS as a branded marketplace for private providers. Rather,
it is demonstrative of the way our entire representative system has been bought
out. That the NHA Party
even had to be formed is a clear indictment of our democratic health.

Two
conclusions must be drawn. Firstly, the press, taken as a whole, have failed to
inform the public adequately about what is happening to the health service.
Mass campaigning to reinstate the democratic basis of the NHS in England will
not come from the press. Secondly, Labour are deeply implicated in what has
happened and despite encouraging words from Andy Burnham it would be unwise to
presume that, if left to their own devices, they will reinstate a genuine NHS
come 2015 – that’s if they form a
majority, or if they find willing
coalition partners. The NHS is too important to leave to a kaleidoscope of red
and yellow ‘ifs’ and a dysfunctional electoral system.

Campaigning
will be left to the public, patients, medical staff, unions, individual
journalists and bloggers, local press, academics and many more. Organisation,
communication and cooperation are all major challenges. Much of the best
material on what’s happening is found on personal blogs and campaign sites,
which are rarely established publishing platforms and are often run by people
working flat out in their spare time on top of full time jobs. Burke’s ‘little
platoons’ have not been manifested in Cameron’s “Big Serco”, a smokescreen for
the mass looting of public services, but in the wave of civic energy that has
mobilised to oppose it.

Yet
this does leave a role for the more established but non-mainstream platforms,
such as openDemocracy. We asked ourselves how we could best use our resources,
infrastructure and networks to assist what is a nationwide NHS campaign. We had
already published some excellent material on the NHS bill but we wanted to do
more. As of August 2012, we raised funds, built an expert advisory board,
partnered with many of the leading sites for NHS action in the country and
built a dedicated section of openDemocracy – OurNHS. The site is not finished but it’s
functioning, we are publishing, and we will be adding many features to it over
the coming months.

What
we intend to do now:

Firstly,
publish as much original and high quality content as we can. The site was
launched with a long essay written for us by David Owen,
introducing his NHS reinstatement bill (a shortened version was published at
the Guardian). Already this week we have published ‘The great NHS robbery’ by Marcus Chown and an
illuminating piece of investigative work by Andrew Robertson, of the
Social Investigations blog. Next week, we have articles from Clive Peedell of
the NHA Party and Anna Cootes, formerly of the King’s Fund.

Secondly,
we want to cross-post and help publicise the best content from across the web. On
Tuesday we cross-posted an excellent piece by Max Davie on the battle to keep
Lewisham hospital fully operational and we intend to highlight and reproduce
the best of the web regularly.

Thirdly,
campaigning. We will continue to work with our partners, advisory board and
many others on this front.

What
do we need: input. Article submissions, suggestions, ground level reports,
personal accounts, video/audio submissions, ideas for campaigns, information on
events that we can help publicise – all the above. You can submit material here, and contact us here.

And
we need funding. To run OurNHS properly, with editorial time, publishing costs,
editing, commissioning, office space, meeting space, financial controls, web
support – it all costs money. The ‘How
the BBC betrayed the NHS’ report was a 50 hour job, for instance, it would
not have been feasible without being funded by openDemocracy. We want to raise
£40,000 a year and run the project until 2016, by which time we hope to see a
new government in place and a democratic health system restored. We have
already raised £12,500. To make the project sustainable we urgently need to
raise the rest.

On a
budget of this size every single donation helps. We are mostly supported by
charitable grants and donations but this is a political project – we are
relying on non-charitable donations.

If
you want to make a contribution you can donate
directly to the OurNHS project here.

Dr Ingrid Wolfe,
Honorary Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Gabriel Scally, formerly of the
Department of Health, now an IPPR fellow

About the author

Oliver Huitson is Co-Editor at OurKingdom and a freelance journalist. He contributed chapters to Jenny Manson's 2012 book, Public Service on the Brink, and NHS SOS (2013). He has written for The Guardian, The New Statesman, Vice and the BBC. He is on Twitter as @OllyHuitson

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